Featured Voice: Christine Chio on Revving up Research During the Ramp-Down

For the past 6 weeks our lab has continued our science remotely. It is certainly a difficult time and everyone is trying to cope in their individual ways--my postdoc Marina who is an avid baker, has figured out a way to make yeast at home so that she could bake!

We all try to stay connected and engaged by having regular meetings on Zoom, sometimes even just to chat about how things are going at home. We also have a chat group on Slack where we share pictures of homemade masks, our struggle to get toilet paper or general comic relief.

In terms of continuing to push our research forward without access to our usual toolbox of instruments, I encouraged my lab members to think creatively about how to effectively use this ‘downtime.’

To: The Chio Lab
Subject: Staying Busy During the Ramp-Down

Hi Team!

As we are all getting used to our new norm, I would like to share some thoughts about how to make the most of our research ramp-down. This is a great time to compile and analyze your data more deeply than you could have before when you were “stuck” at the bench.

Plan for experiments that you will do when you get back and take the opportunity to read the literature in your field and related fields more deeply and more broadly than you had time for before. It is perhaps not a bad idea to work on manuscripts and other writing projects, ones close at hand and ones that are farther out in the future.